Columbia Weekly Review (3/28/25)

Hi Cougars! After a week, our mung beans had sprouted, but each person had it grown differently. One bottle had the bean grown into bean sprouts due to the hypocotyl extending instead of the root, which was done without a light source. Conversely, many bottles grew leaves. Even though light did not meet the plant, the hypocotyl would max out its growth, and the roots and the leaves would grow instead. It was such an engaging experiment to see how any lack of factor could affect plant growth. Also, some kids loved eating the bean sprouts very much. Now onto the real deal, we revisited Civil Engineering through Cinderella. We let each table draw their own Cinderella story like a comic since it was a prominent fairy tale trope across the world. Then, I inserted an unexpected event in which Cinderella's stepmother blew up the bridge to the castle, and we transitioned to learning about bridges. Here, we discovered how bridges utilized compression and tension when a load was applied onto the deck. We moved on to different types of bridges, such as arch, beam, suspension, cable-stayed, cantilever, and many other unique bridges. The kids, as well as the teachers, were curious about how a bridge was built in the first place, so I explained the "hollow-box" method that was implemented to the Golden Gate bridge construction: workers built a hollow box in the river, then drained the water inside, built the tower, and extended the deck from each tower until the whole deck was connected. This lesson was quite long, but it was honestly fun to attract everyone's curiosity. Stay tuned for next week because we will be building truss bridges out of spaghetti for Cinderella.